A logo is an integral piece of your brand and will dictate how anaudience perceives your company, so if you’re feeling overwhelmed at the thought of choosing a design, it’s okay. This is an important decision. Your logo needs to clearly communicate the personality of your company—the best logos will actually become synonymous with your brand name—think McDonalds, Nike and Twitter.

That’s why we created the following guide to get you started and hopefully make the processof choosing your logo a little bit easier.

Your email list is a bit like your house plants. Really, you ask? Well, the analogy isn’t as far off as you may think. Like house plants, your email list is pretty easy to keep up when you first get it. However, things get more challenging the longer you have it. 

With plants, you have to make sure you water and feed them and give them the proper amount of light. You get busy with the holiday or with a project and the next thing you know those house plants have seen better days. To save them from an unfortunate demise, you’ll want to give them some good plant food, water them and make sure they have to right temperature and humidity to flourish. 

You’ll want to do something similar with your email list if it’s gotten brown and wilted. It’s called list re-engagement, and it’s the next topic in our series on connecting with your customer.  

Red is the color of love and passion. It’s bold and vibrant. It demands our attention and inspires us to action. This February, red takes on another meaning.  Friday, February 7th is National Wear Red Day, a day dedicated to women’s heart health. 

Heart disease and stroke are still the leading causes of deaths among women, nearly 1 in 3— that’s more than all cancers combined. Here are some tips to keep your heart strong:

Over two billion people, more than a quarter of the world’s population, have watched at least one of the 3.5 billion broadcasts on Facebook Live.

Videos created on this platform also receive six times more interactions than standard Facebook videos, and will boost your content in the Facebook algorithm.

Sounds great, right?

But how does this impact you as a business owner?

Why should you care?

You could be pardoned for not finding caterpillars particularly appealing. They’re ungainly, unshapely and sometimes downright hideous. However we also know from science class that many caterpillars will enter a cocoon and emerge as beautiful butterflies. It’s not hard to see how the analogy applies to a business coming out of a restructuring. Like the caterpillar, your business didn’t look particularly attractive. Otherwise you wouldn’t have gone through the painful process of reworking it from the ground up. You have emerged from your metaphorical cocoon and it’s time to spread your wings and show the world who you are now.

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When it comes to making positive changes in our lives, we’re often more likely to come up with reasons they can’t be done, rather than how to make them happen. But many times the only thing that's stopping us is ourselves. Try small changes and give them a chance. You might be surprised how easy they can insinuate themselves into your life and make things better.

How long have you lived in your house? Did you just move in or have you spent many comfortable years under the same roof? If you’ve lived in the same place for a while you probably have noticed how your stuff seems to accumulate. That shelf full of knick-knacks fills up and there hasn’t been room in the garage for the car in some time. When we’re on the move, we often have to make choices about what to take and what to leave behind. Yes, we have some great memories with that trusty sofa, but there isn’t room in the moving van.

Contrary to popular belief, marketing involves much more than setting up a Facebook page, renting a billboard and running a few ads. Another valuable marketing tool that you can employ in your business is the sales letter. If you’re not familiar with the idea, think of it as a paper salesman. The purpose is to convince your audience to purchase a good or service.

You’re pretty good at what you do, right? That’s a big reason why you went into business. No reasonable person starts an accounting firm if they struggle with math or opens a computer repair shop if they don’t know the difference between CMOS and a C prompt. 

You need to do more than just be good at something to stay in business though. You have to let people know that you’re good at what you do, and more importantly, that you’re good for them. In our series on Connecting with Your Customer, we’ll look at a number of ways you can form a strong, authentic bond with potential customers. The first step, of course, is to find said customer. And not just any customer either. You want to find your target customer.

You can’t really be telling me that you don’t have a membership site?

I’m here to tell you that you need one.

I don’t care what business you are in, whether it is online or bricks & mortar, whether you do coaching and consulting, whether you are in the professional services or food services, or maintenance services or whatever. Do not fall into the “But, my business is different!” trap.

Because it is not.

Here are just a few reasons to have a membership site:

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Manage infinite levels of paid (or free) membership using JoomFuse to integrate the automation of Infusionsoft with the power of Joomla. You control who gets access to what content... and when. JoomFuse manages access and action triggers for you, driven by Infusionsoft tags. No more duct-taping third-party software programs to try to get what you need to manage your membership (subscription) programs. Now you can sleep at night knowing it's taken care of for you.

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Change isn’t easy. After all, we’ve already got a lot invested in the status quo. Large scale change in a business means disrupting the very foundation we’ve relied upon. It means tough choices that will affect not just us, but our vendors, employees, stockholders, not to mention their families. It involves extensive, often emotionally laden discussions on what’s going well, what’s not going so well and what’s the best path forward. However to remain competitive a business must be nimble, and that means change whether we like it or not.

It doesn’t matter if you run an Etsy shop out of your garage or a multinational corporation. Social media needs to be present in your 2020 marketing strategy. Keeping abreast of the latest trends and changes in social media will help you build an effective strategy to ensure success in the New Year and beyond.  Here are five points to consider:

Every business requires the services of a graphic designer at some point or another. But for small to medium-sized businesses, it doesn’t make financial sense to have someone on the payroll full-time. Luckily, in this digital age, it’s possible to hire freelance graphic designers for one-time projects from the comfort of your home or office. Here are five websites where you can get quality graphic design work done cheap: